Live music - Cat Power
In Facebook parlance, Chan Marshall and Dublin have a ‘complicated’ relationship. In 2003, Marshall — Cat Power is her stage name — gave a car crash performance at Whelan’s. Dishevelled and incoherent, she stumbled through a series of increasingly drowsy anecdotes and half-remembered songs, her mutterings accompanied by a rising volley of boos. It was equal parts horrifying and fascinating, a meltdown that quickly assumed quasi-mythic status among concert-goers.
A decade later Marshall is back, determined, by the looks of things, to make amends (artist and audience alike appear to have glossed over a dreary turn at Tripod in 2007). She more or less pulls it off though it’s unsteady going at times. Twenty minutes in, the 42 year old Georgia, USA native is on her feet, hefting a monitor which she complains is blocking the view of some uber-fans in the front row. Later, at a piano, she breaks off mid-song, protesting the beauty of the venue — awestruck by the Olympia’s creaky venerability; it is distracting. You worry that she might spin off the track at any moment.
